Tuesday Trivia | And We’re Rolling: Primary Source Audio and Video

I really like encouraging people to share interesting primary sources on Tuesdays, so far we’ve done letters, newspapers, and images, so here’s yet another primary sources theme: audio and video!

Please show us an interesting historical sound or video recording, and give us a short write-up about it. What is this recording, and what does it tell us?

For all the specialists whose studies fall well before the invention of recorded sound and moving images who are now feeling left out, you may get a little loose with it. Modern recordings of historical music, oral histories, recordings of historically-informed arts performances, a panorama or video tour of an ancient site, demonstrations of people using historical tools or weapons, these are just a few things I can think of that would be cool to see!

Moderation will be gentle, and in addition the 20-year-rule will be loosened (sounds and videos recorded after 1993 are allowed if they are suitably “primary”) but the spirit of the law will be enforced. No current events, no documentaries, no podcasts, no current history movies!

Looking for some historical audio and video? Here’s yet another Librarian Links Roundup:

Library of Congress’s American Memory Project Contains a large variety of sound and moving images from American history.

I don’t normally like to bring up the Moreschi recordings for a couple of reasons. One, I primarily do opera, and Alessandro Moreschi was not an opera singer, and two, because when I talk about the castrati I know some people are just looking for a free ticket to the freakshow and don’t really want to hear about them as artists, and the Moreschi recordings can quickly be lumped into “Cracked.com’s 17 Wackiest Historical Oddities” if you don’t contextualize them very carefully. So you have to read my whole thing before you listen, because if you just scroll to the end and click the links and say “ugh” and close them because you don’t like it, I will be so very sad.

The first thing you need to consider before listening to Moreschi is that this was all recorded on very primitive equipment in 1902-04, so the sound quality is miles below what you’re used to. One “trick” to get your ear primed is to listen to other contemporary recordings in all their low-quality glory first, so open up this Youtube link of Emma Calvé in 1908 (very famous operatic soprano of the time). If you get through that before you’re done reading try some Enrico Caruso from the same year. But listen to Calvé in particular because early recording technology really struggled with soprano voices.

While you’re listening, a little background on how these records came to be.

In general terms, one problem faced by the early Gramophone company was that you couldn’t sell record players to the public without having interesting things to play on them, so they had to amass themselves a decent catalog of recorded things to sell even the playback equipment. Around the turn of the century the Gramophone company sent recording specialists around the world trying to persuade interesting artists and others to be recorded. (Calvé and Caruso from above were both recorded in this same record-drive.) The Sistine choir was hit up twice in this effort.

On one of their first trips, they wanted to record Caruso (who lived in Milan), but they found out he wouldn’t be available to record for a couple of days later than they’d planned, and they had some time to kill. They’d previously approached the Pope about being recorded, but he politely declined. (Eventually Pope Leo XIII would be recorded in 1903, he is included as the last track on the Moreschi CD chanting “Ave Maria.”) However, they were offered the ability to record the Sistine choir, so they made the trip to Rome for a couple of days and recorded them, as well as some solo numbers from the musical director and leading soloist Professor Moreschi, who actually wasn’t the only castrato in the choir at that time.

For the recording technology: Moreschi would have had his face inside a huge cone while he was singing, which would have looked like this, and a wiggling stylus would cut the waveform into a wax disk. He was one of the very first singers to try out this new medium, there were no guides on to how to do this, no sound artists adjusting levels in the background, and these are all one-shot recordings, no room for second tries and do-overs to get a perfect performance. And the sound quality, yes, it’s bad, the majority of the harmonics for his high notes are lost and he is constantly accompanied by Snap, Crackle and Pop. Even the piano accompanying him sounds like utter crap, but at least we all know what a piano normally sounds like, we don’t have to judge all pianos ever by these few recordings.

I can’t really overemphasize the small miracle that these recordings exist at all. Their existence is dependant on 1) the tiny overlap of time between the age of the castrati and the birth of recording technology, 2) Caruso was busy, the Pope wasn’t interested, and 3) Prof. Moreschi was willing to go way out of his comfort zone. He was a well-respected man, in his 40s, who was used to singing in the finest cathedrals for the Pope, being asked to sing into a crazy contraption with no clear benefit to himself. Frankly, I think Prof. Moreschi was very brave and cool to be even willing to mess with this newfangled bullhorn-in-your-face recording nonsense that week in April, he could have declined to be recorded very respectably, and then we’d have absolutely nothing. I also am not sure that the guys from Gramophone fully realized the magnitude of what they’d captured: the 1902 recordings are listed in the 1904 Red Label record catalog (scroll to page 15) with only a pretty oblique reference that Moreschi was a castrato, and some vagueness about this type of all-male choir being very rare.

They came back two years later in April 1904 and made more recordings. Moreschi did record the same song (“Crucifixus”) on both trips, which gives us interesting evidence of him getting used to the recording process. In the first 1902 recording he is clearly nervous, his voice is flat and shaky, but he must have decided to have another crack at that one, because the second 1904 recording is a much stronger performance.

Now that we’ve covered the recording process, a couple of quick observations on the singing style, because it’s often critisized: it sounds like Moreschi is using a technique called acciaccatura to start some of his high notes, this is a sort of grace note (I am not a singer, sorry!) that is not popular anymore, and not in keeping with modern tastes in singing, and sounds a lot like a fault. He also has the “sobbing” inflection (sometimes nicknamed the “Neapolitan Sob”) that is still around today but that many people find extremely disagreeable. I won’t try to influence your tastes too much, but these are elements of taste and not skill, so do not judge him too harshly for them.

Hooray! Now you’re fully qualified to listen to the Moreschi recordings and hopefully you can hear his voice for what it is. I’m only going to cover 3 recordings, but there’s more out there of course. (I had to create a soundcloud account and upload these from my own rips of the CD, because some ASSCLOWN uploaded heavily processed versions to archive.org and that’s all that’s on there. I also can’t find decent uploads on youtube.)

The first one is “Ideale,” which was recorded in 1902 on the first trip. I like this one best out of all the recordings for a couple of reasons, one, you can really hear the simple sweetness of his high notes, and two, because his choir friends all can’t help themselves and cheer for him at the end, huzzah, because they clearly think he did a bang up job! That for me really reaches right through time and humanizes these recordings. The world may dismiss Moreschi now as a second-rate freak warbler, but his comrades in choir-arms thought he was good, and that’s good enough for me.

The second recording you should listen to is a Gregorian chant which was recorded on the second 1904 trip. His voice, unaccompanied, you can really hear it for what it is and not get distracted by the music too much. He does a quite a few acciaccaturas though, be ready.

The third recording has small editing fudge suggested by Clapton in his book on Moreschi (citation below), which is to put a echo on the recordings to get some idea of what it would have sounded like in if you were listening in the very last pew of a cathedral, which is what Moreschi would have been used to singing in. I have done this (just in Audacity) on his recording of Ave Maria. I find this a very listenable effect. The sobbing and the acciaccaturas are really smoothed out, and the rather bad violin accompanying him is rendered unrecognizable. It also lets you get your ears into the ethereal effect of the castrato voice.

Anyway, congrats if you made it this far, I love you for it, seriously. XOXO.

Wow, this was interesting on many levels for me! The first is Leo XIII and his initial refusal to be recorded. This contrasts fairly starkly with Pius XII and his eager adoption of new technologies. I am always afscinated by the differences in temperament between pontiffs.

Secondly, the recording of "Ideale" was interesting for its display of acciaccatura. First, as a young tenor I was accused of the practice. I could only figure out the definition by context, as my language skills at the time were atrocious. I was mortified to be called out in front of the choir, and had to quickly try to rid myself of that quirk. It can be off-putting, but I found out later that it can be useful in larger venues with imperfect acoustics. When I sang in a few churches in Europe, I found that when using an unamplified voice in an echoing cathedral that you sounded best during a note and that the beginnings and ends of notes were largely lost. You could cheat in getting the required volume by taking a bit more risk in hitting a note, since you didn't have to hit it cleanly every single time. Just hitting the power and being "close enough" seemed to work quite well. And I hadn't even read your line about adding the echo in "Ave Maria" yet! Fascinating!

The second song would be enough to convince me that his use of acciaccaatura is a choice, rather than a necessity. He is able to hit higher notes perfectly cleanly than the ones he uses the technique on. I have heard it used in Gregorian chant before, and though I have little experience with that style it would not surprise me,that it was a stylistic choice.

Dude! The note at about 2:30 of the third selection! You nailed it with calling it ethereal! Then at the 3:00 minute mark there it is again! You are so right on the echoes evening out the sobs and cheat notes. How wonderful that these recordings survived!

Than you so much for working on this post! I read every word and listened to every second of audio. Out-freaking-standing!

By the way, soundcloud thinks I may be interested in Big Boi and Skrillex since I liked Moreschi...

Oh, that is too cool that you have personally used that method in certain settings and know it works! Clapton is a professional singer so I trust his analysis of the singing methods, but it's nice to have you agree too! Moreschi was the last of a 350 year old singing tradition (quite separate from opera really), and he must have been taught to attack his high notes like that.

I don't know anything about Leo XIII other than his interaction with the Sistine choir, and I'm not sure what finally convinced him to be recorded, it was only a few months before he died! There's also a bit of silent film footage of him from earlier, he's blessing the camera which I find amusing. Someone's put the two recordings together on Youtube. His successor, Pius X, was involved in the big musical reforms going on in the Vatican at that time, he's the one who officially put the nail in the coffin for the castrati too in 1903, right after Leo XIII died, but Leo wasn't a big fan of the castrati either.

Just to be clear, my singing experience should not be taken as authoritative. I was merely an amateur with a small bit of talent and a lot of passion who got to be in a number of choirs through school and university. At no time was I a professional, or even a good student of music. So, yeah, lean on Clapton!

As for the video, Catholic religious like to bless just about anything you put in front of them! As a lifelong Catholic, it would be weirder for me to see a pope not bless something new that was shown to him than the opposite. It is a very neat video, though, as I had no idea such recordings existed. The fact that they can be put up on youtube for everyone to look at is amazing.

So, was it Pius X that ended the castrati tradition, or a more complex series of things?

I have the utmost respect for amateur singers! My singing experience pretty much starts and ends with the car...

It was more complex, as with all things castrati. It had a lot to do with the Cecilian movement of reforming church music and taking it back to Gregorian roots (which you may already know about), and the idea that church music had gotten too theatrical and fancy, and needed to be returned to humble beginnings. Pius X wrote Tra le sollecitudini which outlined the musical reforms of the Cecilianists, and almost as an aside, also said no more castrati (part 5,13). The last 3 castrati in the Sistine choir finished out their time to qualify for their pension, and then they were gone. (It also didn't help that the Sistine choir had been kinda sucky for a few years, so reformers had something to point at.)

It's also interesting that in his 1904 recording of Incipit Lamentatio, Moreschi used a setting that had recently been made "illegal" by that motu proprio. You can read a few things into that, he might have just been trying to save a little bit of his art that he'd dedicated his life to that was now going to be wiped out, or he might have been being a bit naughty and rebellious and chafing under the new musical regime. Who knows! I personally fall in the "Moreschi was sticking his tongue out at the Cecilianists" interpretation.

This is all pretty great by the way, I've listened to all the recordings that you've linked and am delighted that I got to hear something so rare. I love music history, and this is something I've never even touched before.

I listen to a lot of low-fi music, so I didn't have any trouble at all getting my ears "primed". I find that the background static and pop can really make a song. Thats why record players are still something to be treasured in this day and age. I particularly liked the Gregorian Chant, do you have any good resources on Gregorian music that I could read up on?

The musical arrangement of the chant. It used to be more common that the same words (like a libretto for an opera, or a poem) would be 'set' by different people to different tunes. So Moreschi used good lyrics, but a naughty tune. :)

Just wanted to say thanks for the great detail you've put up here, I started off by being linked from depth-hub, remotely curious about an historical figure not included in Wikipedia, and here I am... these recordings are fantastic. This is what should be on the front page.

I am a huge fan of Moreschi so thank you for this. But most especially thanks for the cathedral edit of the Ave Maria - it is out of this world! Absolutely beautiful. I find it so fascinating how his voice suddenly takes on such a beautiful clarity and purity - that makes me wonder whether the accaciaturas and other effects of singing at the time may have actually been desired because of the environments in which music was so often performed in those days (as opposed to the very pure style of opera we have now since recordings became de rigeur). Fascinating and beautiful. Thank you.

Glad you liked it! Never had anyone offhand say they were a huge fan of Moreschi before, usually people wrinkle their nose and I feel sad, this is very refreshing. :) If you have the Moreschi recordings on hand (I'm guessing you do?) feel free to try an echo on more of them in Audacity, works well for other ones, esp. the Gregorian chant.

I regularly play the Moreschi recordings for friends who aren't familiar with him and—sadly—often see a negative reaction. I can't understand why so few people can truly appreciate the man given his life circumstances and his ultimately being a great musician despite a life none of us could begin to imagine. Thank God Pope Leo was happy for the recordings to take place (despite his own desire to not be recorded at first). Thanks for your link to his style—I will read it with great interest.

It is hard to fully grasp the magnitude of the AIDS crisis and the tremendous impact of ACT UP from written description alone. Video footage of ACT UP is a pretty incredible thing. Not only do you get an idea of the size and scope of some of their demonstrations, but you also are able to see the people engaged in these protests. They are ordinary people doing extraordinary things.One of the best ever primary source in my field is the ACT UP oral history project, which is a collection of interviews with living members of ACT UP/New York. The actual footage is not readily accessible to the public, but full transcripts and brief video clips of all the interview are available online here.There have also been some incredible documentaries recently about ACT UP, and the AIDS crisis more generally. United in Anger was based on the Oral History Project and done by the same people. I have not been able to see it yet, as it hasn't been released and made easily accessible to the public. Having read the interviews and knowing the context of the research I feel very confident that it is truly excellent. You can watch a trailer here. The combination of footage and interviews is pretty incredible.The other big ACT UP documentary is How to Survive a Plague, which looks more at the treatment activism side of ACT UP. Although I have a few issues with the stories they chose to highlight, it is still a really wonderful documentary with some amazing footage. It is available on Netflix, so you have no excuse not to watch it. View the trailer here.Footage of ACT UP protests is pretty incredible and really important and significant. The Oral History Project is also just an impossibly important work; that we have a large number of interviews with surviving members is going to be so important for the future.

woops! I didn't see the "no documentaries" rule. Mods, feel free to remove if necessary. I chose to include these docs because they are really the only easily accessible video of ACT UP protests. Also I would argue that they are far closer to primary sources than a true documentary as we usually understand it. But again, Mods, if this doesn't belong here, let me know and I'll remove it.

I think political ads can be incredibly interesting historic artifacts that can give some really great insight into the political trends and public opinion at the time when they were made. They were designed for the sole purpose of conveying small packets of cultural information that tells us, as historians, what was important to the average American of the period. By looking at what's included in the messages that candidates are conveying and what is intentionally left out of these message we can get a great look into the dynamics of the race and of the political and cultural forces of the time.

They also tell us a lot about the candidates running for office in that we get some great insight into not only their political priorities but also their demeanor and how the conducted themselves during their campaign. You can pretty much predict the winner and loser solely by looking at their political advertising and how it evolved over the campaign (weak candidates go on the defensive while the stronger ones go all out in their attacks).

On the other side of things, ads also give a lot of insight into the business of advertising and how the techniques and styles have changed since the first political ads were made in 1952 for Eisenhower by the big Madison Ave. firms (think Don Draper).

1952, the first year that we saw TV ads used to their fullest in elections, you had the American war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson II competing for the presidency. Eisenhower was immensely popular and utilized TV advertisements to great effect during his campaign. Most of his ads were part of a series called "Eisenhower Answers America" and they were incredibly short pithy responses to questions from average Americans.

"Never Had So Good" and "Bus Driver" are great examples of this. Now compare this to Adlai Stevenson's ads like "The Same God Made Us All" and "Endorsement Woman". Stevenson's ads were much longer, drier, and not as witty as Eisenhower's. Also Stevenson never actually appeared in any of his ads. You can also notice the difference in the cartoon ads: Eisenhower's "Ike For President" featured entertaining visuals and a really catchy tune while Stevenson's "Adlai to You" had much cruder visuals and a pretty lame song. Overall Eisenhower absolutely trounces Stevenson in his use of TV ads and and Eisenhower goes to ultimately win the '52 election. While the connection between TV ads and outcomes is not necessarily causal there is still a significant correlation to the quality of one's TV ads and their ability to do well in the general election.

It's certainly interesting to note how political advertisements evolved from cartoons with catchy tunes and ads with pithy one liners to what we have today though many of the same themes are still at work, for instance look at Obama's 2008 "Yes We Can" ad (Sorry mods it's the only time, I swear) where Obama is not explicating his political platform but instead using a catchy song to get an inspirational message across (similar to the "I Like Ike" ad above). Also note his use of celebrities which is certainly not a new innovation in the field, see Kennedy's "Henry Fonda".

Since this post is already way too long I'll provide links to a few notable examples of political ads over the years:

1980 - Reagan was a master at TV ads: "Prouder, Stronger, Better"(the first use of idealic scenes of Americana that we see today) and the super profound and almost threatening ad called "Bear" are great examples of Reagan's ability to diversify his arsenal of advertisements.

I did not know that Stevenson's uninspired political ads were a possible contributor to his campaign loss, fascinating stuff, thank you for sharing! (I have a big soft spot for him, I'm actually one of the very few people who've been inside his childhood home, I've stood in the spot where he accidentally killed his friend, the person giving me the tour told me that after I'd stood there for a while, thanks a lot!)

Now I'm curious -- have you studied political campaigning formally? I remember it being offered by the poli sci department at my school.

Also, mentioning recent events to place them within historical context is borderline, but generally okay. In this case, as you were comparing them directly to older campaigns, totally fine.

Thanks for reading! Yeah, Stevenson certainly was an interesting guy, his weak TV spots were definitely just one of many things contributing to his loss since the cards were stacked against him from the beginning. The guy was pretty much conscripted against his will by the DNC to run against Eisenhower, McCarthyism was killing the Dems at this time, and Stevenson's association with Truman was caustic. Also, I had no idea that he shot his childhood friend, that's pretty impressive that he was able to gets past that and accomplish as much as he did.

have you studied political campaigning formally?

I never took a class specific to campaigning when I was in university but I do work with elections now (from an institutional rather than a campaigning standpoint though). I've always been interested in them and I'm certainly one of a select few who actually gets excited when election season rolls around.

I know I'm a day late (and perhaps a dollar short) but I wanted to share one of my favorites.

The work of John Lomax and his son Alan, traveling the country and recording local music for the Library of Congress, preserved SO MUCH incredible Americana that probably would not have survived otherwise. They really worked hard to leave no stone unturned and their story is pretty amazing. I love the blues, and their work was incredibly important to preserving a lot of early material.

I think my favorite might be James "Iron Head" Baker's recording of Black Betty, the earliest known extant version of the song made popular by Ram Jam and an arena rock/stadium music staple to this day. Originally thought to have been written and first recorded by the legendary Leadbelly, Huddie Ledbetter, this recording from the scorching hot prison farm in Sugar Land, Texas in 1933 is probably going to forever be the earliest known version of the song. Lomax made over 10,000 recordings during his travels and it is preserved today as part of the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center.

Lamentably I cannot go as in depth with this as I'd like to at the moment, being in the middle of a big move. Recently I (re)listened to the recorded interview of H. L. Mencken, taken to preserve the writer's voice and ad-lib wit for the Library of Congress' American Memory Project, as /u/caffarelli linked to in the thread's description. The LoC link is only an excerpt, but I found a youtube playlist that contains the interview in its entirety. This particular source is of interest, at least to me, as I believe it's the only recording of his voice that has been made and preserved for the public memory. While I am certainly critical in turn of a lot of the things that he had to say (though he was, of course, a product of his time), my connection to Mencken is one of fascination with his character, love of his wit and demeanor, and that he was instrumental to my own learning of sophisticated English (which is my second language).

I suspect there will be a few, particularly outside of the United States, who will not be very familiar with Mencken. Easily one of the most influential and lettered journalists and prose stylists of the twentieth century in the United States, Mencken was known for his blunt, verbose, and scathing essays and articles on American culture and politics, most notably during the 1920s and 1930s, with some significant output up until his death in 1956. Perhaps most famous for his lengthy history and analysis of The American Language and his reporting during the 1925 Scopes Trial (he coined the term "monkey trial"), he began his career with The Baltimore Herald and The Baltimore Sun, later wrote a little for The Smart Set (you'll hear his opinions on that in the interview), and founded The American Mercury with George Jean Nathan.

In the interview, you're going to hear some interesting opinions that Mencken had in regard to architectural and decorative aesthetics; living in Baltimore (he spent his entire life there); Baltimore journalism and the changes it underwent in his lifetime; his attitudes toward cigars, music, and religion; opinions on American politics and democratic government; his methods of coping with prohibition (he was fond of beer and drink of all type); and boxing.

Not one to eschew controversy, you're never going to hear a boring opinion written in one of Mencken's works. Critical of democracy for its entrustment of power to the plainfolk, who he believed acted often times in opposition to what he considered the "educated minority." Even so, he reveled in the American experience, thinking of its politics as "incomparably idiotic, and thus infinitely amusing"—"the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage." He was very scathing of populist movements, and perhaps the most derisive critic of William Jennings Bryan, whom he called "the indefatigable Jennings," going so far as to call Adolf Hitler "an Austrian William Jennings Bryan" (also referring to Hitler as "a Babbit run amok"). Immensely distrustful of such plainfolk, Mencken with no reservation voiced his opinions on the "booboisie," even in a mockery of poor literary education, translated the Declaration of Independence into simplified speech to be better understood by the masses of his time. One of his better known works, moreover, is "The Sahara of the Bozart," (PDF) a lengthy criticism of Southern culture prior to the Southern Renaissance (recommended from a literary perspective; its quality as a historical source is poor). Hyperbole was key to his writing; his criticisms always included it, and his less common advocacy of cultural elements he favored. He was not a strong advocate of objective journalism, and so his writing is as much a look into the person as they are the events he wrote about and the style he used. He's an excellent primary source, but not always one to help you negotiate your way to the facts. I know labor historians will certainly have some strong opinions on him due to his criticisms of Roosevelt and the New Deal. His idolization of German culture (though he despised National Socialism and the "thugs" that ran it) lost him a good amount of readership, though already well past the prime of his career.

I made a submission about this in /r/badhistory, but he also hoodwinked a great deal of reporters, historians, and the public with a short history of the bathtub in the United States, every word of which being a fabrication. The misinformation that Mencken provided went on to be printed in reputable publication as actual fact, though Mencken only sought to demonstrate how susceptible so many were to readily accept, without question, propaganda during WWI (doing so very successfully, might I add). He made an official retraction in 1926, but this did not necessarily stop the work being used as factual source material.

Again, this write up does not do justice as even a short biography of the man, so due to time constraints I'll live some further sources for anyone interested to look for in the library: